D'AWWWWCTOPUS: post yr images of adorable octopuses here (no squid allowed)

That is genuinely amazing.

It's....something.

https://78.media.tumblr.com/4c66838a0c35fd3b4a3a9091d80a8532/tumblr_p4tmhqnHT51qm9k25o1_r3_500.gif

v delicate li'l guy, would stroke

https://twitter.com/i/moments/970432629320355840

oops i mean

pic.twitter.com/LFWkcdQo6Y

— MꙬse Allain (@MooseAllain) March 4, 2018

https://68.media.tumblr.com/e8a831d66fac1cb6009133264d34e2c1/tumblr_p5fn3cKFZo1vlks32o1_1280.jpg

https://78.media.tumblr.com/3ca68d9a9d7108dcefd73b505d352ecf/tumblr_p0j2vnaYXi1rraqsio1_1280.jpg

wow what a beauty

more like awe-ctopus

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=Kl5A7gHsoRc

https://68.media.tumblr.com/e8ffbb6837265accf28fc4f696097440/tumblr_om3xtpwjUq1s1vn29o1_1280.jpg

kind of lol but mostlyaaaiiyeeeTF?!

1) flabby bits
2) intelligent
3) mostly relax
4) wrinkles

octopus is basically a damp kind of elephant

https://montereybayaquarium.tumblr.com/post/172330204589/anoceanloverworld-cuttlefish-can-change-color-to

he look like a hippo

ha he does

oh my god the algae octopus
https://i.imgur.com/M0scGnO.jpg

angular! i love him!

He looks like a golden wizard!

If the world lasted long enough, would the world’s animals evolve to a most-charismatic-to-humans state?

That's a very good point - I worked with a conservation agency one time and they referred to "charismatic megafauna" - as in, people are only motivated to save large, appealing animals.

Or, in this thread's case, animals that show surprising intelligence and occasionally psychic abilities regarding football matches.

To try to answer Hunt3r's questions seriously, charisma is one way to go, another would be to taste good to humans, or to be hardy enough to survive in radically different (read: warmer) environments.

"large" as in "bigger than nematodes" - octopuses are both charismatic and megafauna

Now reading the Peter Godfrey-Smith OTHER MINDS book about octopus intelligence and it is soooooo goooood

I find the actual anatomy of octopus brains rather fascinating. Essentially, it seems most of it is in two lobes behind each eye processing visual information, with relatively little mass devoted to integrating everything into unified neural correlates of the world outside. Their esophagus passes through their brain.

http://tolweb.org/tree/ToLimages/vampbrainvent3.400a.jpg

Also worth noting, octopuses do not recognize themselves in the mirror test. Really no fault to them, we can't all be magpies, bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, or some primates.

They're similar to dogs in this respect, though of course dogs can recognize other individuals and do appear to have some second order theory of mind, if lacking a first order one.

I see cephalopods as brilliant examples of "the other way to do it" - we centralise our nervous systems so that sensory inputs can be compared, limbs can be cross-coordinated, etc. whereas they are kind of like "intelligent tissue" in that much of their sophistication is achieved in a decentralised, democratic way, an independent control ganglion for each tentacle, communicating with the distributed brain shown above. Or maybe we can equate the tentacle ganglia with our spinal cord, which is the vertebrate centre for embodied intelligence and coordination (and gets very little respect for its sophistication, because it does its work literally without calling attention to its activity). Cephalopod skin is one of their most interesting attributes - its reconfigurable texture and colour is a whole other interaction and communication system, and induces reactions in other cephalopods the same way that we use language, but it seems like a more direct coupling of influence rather than something encoded and decoded.

Or to stretch a metaphor, maybe the human CNS is like the old mainframe systems with multiple terminals running from a common resource, whereas an octopus resembles the Internet of Things with small agents processing independently and messaging to coordinate.

this link won't work but add a parenthesis onto it after it doesn't:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizome_(philosophy)

the v enjoyable lrb review of the peter godfrey-smith book has this:

Like humans, they have centralised nervous systems, but in their case there is no clear distinction between brain and body. An octopus’s neurons are dispersed throughout its body, and two-thirds of them are in its arms: each arm can act intelligently on its own, grasping, manipulating and hunting. (Octopuses have arms, not tentacles: tentacles have suckers only at their tips. Squid and cuttlefish have a combination of arms and tentacles.) In evolutionary terms, the intelligence of octopuses is an anomaly. The last common ancestor between octopuses on the one hand, and humans and other intelligent animals (monkeys, dolphins, dogs, crows) on the other, was probably a primitive, blind worm-like creature that existed six hundred million years ago. Other creatures that are so evolutionarily distant from humans – lobsters, snails, slugs, clams – rate pretty low on the cognitive scale. But octopuses – and to some extent their cephalopod cousins, cuttlefish and squid – frustrate the neat evolutionary division between clever vertebrates and simple-minded invertebrates. They are sophisticated problem solvers; they learn, and can use tools; and they show a capacity for mimicry, deception and, some think, humour.

and a couple of great anecdotes:

Since a comparison with the human brain tells us so little, scientists turn to the octopus’s behaviour as the best indicator of its cognitive power. But here researchers are often frustrated by what Godfrey-Smith describes as a ‘mismatch’ between anecdotal reports and experimental studies. In the lab, octopuses do fairly well: they can navigate mazes, use memory to solve simple puzzles and unscrew jars and child-proof bottles to get food (octopuses have also been filmed opening jam jars from the inside). Yet it can take octopuses a surprisingly long time to be trained in new behaviours, which some researchers have taken as a sign of their cognitive limitations

..

In 1959, Peter Dews, a Harvard scientist, trained three octopuses there to pull a lever to obtain a chunk of sardine. Two of the octopuses, Albert and Bertram, pulled the lever in a ‘reasonably consistent’ manner. But the third, Charles, would anchor his arms on the side of the tank and apply great force to the lever, eventually breaking it and bringing the experiment to a premature end. Dews also reported that Charles repeatedly pulled a lamp into his tank, and that he ‘had a high tendency to direct jets of water out of the tank; specifically … in the direction of the experimenter’. ‘This behaviour,’ Dews wrote, ‘interfered materially with the smooth conduct of the experiments, and is … clearly incompatible with lever-pulling.’ He concluded that his experiment was a partial failure.

and

Captive octopuses appear to be aware of their captivity; they adapt to it but also resist it. When they try to escape, which is often, they tend to wait for a moment they aren’t being watched. Octopuses have flooded laboratories by deliberately plugging valves in their tanks with their arms. At the University of Otago, an octopus short-circuited the electricity supply – by shooting jets of water at the aquarium lightbulbs – so often that it had to be released back into the wild. Jean Boal, a cephalopod researcher at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, reported feeding octopuses in a row of tanks with thawed squid, not an octopus’s favourite food. Returning to the first tank, Boal found that the octopus in it hadn’t eaten the squid, but was instead holding it out in its arm; watching Boal, it slowly made its way across the tank and shoved the squid down the drain. (The third-century Roman rhetorician Claudius Aelianus, a more sympathetic observer than Aristotle, identified the octopus’s main characteristic as ‘mischief and craft’.)

charles t. octopus sounds like a real asshole, i like his style

That review is fascinating, I think I need more reading on this subject.

Rawr!

https://78.media.tumblr.com/a06a31e6a4ba81753763c900b2a3be81/tumblr_p4l9vj2ucL1r2rgtao1_540.jpg

CUTTLEFISH DETECTED

no squid allowed

DO NOT CARE.

https://montereybayaquarium.tumblr.com/post/175019562233/striped-pyjama-squid-sepioloidea-lineolata

https://78.media.tumblr.com/7f9bb2908170f4eb16489de6ca02d4f0/tumblr_padl4tAh6J1ui50dco1_1280.jpg

a scaly boi!

It almost looks like the head of an elephant!

Did you guys see the dawctopus who landed on the guy's windshield?

(Not a joke.)

i uh waht

https://scontent.fnyc1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/35844796_10157573356564465_6633569738767204352_n.jpg?_nc_cat=0&_nc_eui2=AeFdV5nuhLLCfzgnPbG-YYBrvcRUy5qbt7l7AnddvCG1k41F4f_dU35NN3r-7U711RPK_L8S0-MrVAAGSEuKhtUeWfn7SqgiDRH_n3Rg60vJjQ&oh=8af99c0d71f5b216e3a64e1039a0ce3d&oe=5BE9CA2D

wtf sky octopuses are a thing now?

lol

everything else is insane and freakish in the world right now so WHY NOT?

(There was a storm in China and the seas got so rough that aquatic animals were flying everywhere and landing on cars!)

Paul Thomas Anderson is kicking himself rn

lol yep - immediately thought of Magnolia when I first saw it

🎵eight is the loneliest number🎵

hee hee

bg u are a gift